But this was not the home run that Chris Christie had hoped for. The cheer for Anne Romney was louder, and lasted longer. As talented a speaker as Christie is, the town hall is his forum, and improvisation is his game. In this setting, he was good but not great.

It was letdown for a second reason as well, a much more important reason.

Christie talked in this speech a lot about leadership, about telling hard truths. And he’s right that America is running out of time, that the adults in both parties need to take the wheel and steer the nation back to safety. Our politics are dangerously dysfunctional today.

But then Christie broke his own rules. Instead of jumping on this opportunity to make a mark, he spoon fed the home crowd what it wanted. He didn’t challenge the reckless faction of a party that sees compromise as treason, like adolescent drivers who refuse to change course when heading for a crash.

Yes, he did mention the need for bipartisan compromise a few times, briefly. He said it’s time for our leaders to stop tearing each other down, useful advice even if he breaks it himself regularly. And yes, it is asking a lot for a politician to speak hard truths to his own party during a political convention.

But that’s how parties change course. Bill Clinton did it in 1988, telling Democrats that they had to move to the middle if they wanted to win. Ronald Reagan pushed his party the other way. They made their marks. They gave us leadership.

This speech won’t have lasting impact. And that’s the real pity, because Christie is just the man to move his party to safer ground.

He is governing New Jersey effectively, without raising taxes, so he has tremendous cred with the base. He has been speaking to more conservative Republican delegations all week in Tampa, winning their hard-core hearts with his signature smack-down style.

So imagine if Christie had focused this speech not on the need to compromise, on the pain of giving up half of what you want. Imagine if he had talked about how great Republican leaders in the past had done just that, how Ronald Reagan agreed to raise taxes as part of deals because he needed to cut ballooning deficits, how Abraham Lincoln tolerated slavery in the four states that fought with the union because he needed those militias.

This crowd might have listened to him because he is Chris Christie, just as the Cold Warriors listened to Nixon when he opened the door to China. It was a missed opportunity.

Yes, Christie checked the box by mentioning compromise, briefly. He said it was time for our leaders to stop tearing each other down, useful advice even if he famously ignores it himself regularly. So he left the door open to making the case for compromise in the future.

But the big question was whether Christie would use this moment to try to change the party, or to settle for a pep talk. He mostly gave us a pep talk.

He rattled off his accomplishments, saying "they" said his reforms could not be done, a reference the crowd clearly understood to be Democrats. And in this stretch, he seemed to shrink, to become a typical partisan.

This was not a terrible bomb and won’t derail Christie’s dreams of reaching the White House. If only he had taken his own advice.